Big Bag of Africa: Statistics, Governance, and Food

Shanta at the World Bank discusses the importance of good statistics to understanding what goes on in Africa:

Today, only 35 percent of Africa’s population lives in countries that use the 1993 UN System of National Accounts; the others use earlier systems, some dating back to the 1960s. To show that this is not an arcane point, consider the case of Ghana, which decided to update its GDP last year to the 1993 system.  When they did so, they found that their GDP was 62 percent higher than previously thought.  Ghana’s per capita GDP is now over $1,000, making it a middle-income country. ... 
Only 11 African countries have comparable data for the same year. For the others, we need to extrapolate to 2005, sometimes (as in the case of Botswana) from as far back as 1993.
In short, even the economists’ celebratory estimate of poverty declining in Africa during a period of growth needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  In reality, there are many countries for which we simply don’t know.
What’s going on here?

The vice president of Zambia, Guy Scott, is, to not put too fine a point on it, white. Jayawardane argues that this will be most surprising to people who believe African countries are primarily divided along ethnic and tribal lines. For Zambians and many other countries, however, status and occupation are much more important dividing lines.

A very vocal critic of Nigeria's government, Richard Dowden, was invited to speak to the government. He reports his shock at seeing Pres. Jonathan nodding and smiling encouragingly as he and other speakers described what was wrong in the government, including being the highest paid government in the world. His assessment of the president is cautiously optimistic, though he also still has some real questions.

My impression of President Goodluck Jonathan is that he is Nigeria’s first intellectual president – a laid back former academic who wants to walk round a problem before deciding what to do about it. He likes to listen and ask questions – taking his time to understand and reframe the problem.

In other news, nearly half of Zambia's maize production got soaked during the rains last week. While it does not have to be destroyed - the government is optimistic it will dry oat - it may well decrease the amount of maize for human consumption that would have been available after another bumper harvest.

Ghana is providing northern farmers with 110 combine harvesters as part of its agricultural subsidy programs that currently lower the price on 100-150,000 tons of fertilizer.

Banana wilt has already wiped out 20% of the crop in one Ugandan district and is threatening nearly all the rest. This is an area where bananas/plantains are a major staple food.

Simple Development Stories vs. Reality

The differences between what we want to do, what we are good at, and what we [maybe] need to do. (HT: Barder, Source)

 We’ll never really be free of simplistic development stories. But at least that means the rest of us can have jobs adding another layer of reality to the debate: No, Malawi’s fertilizer subsidies are not simply a glorious story of an African government bucking “the Man.” IMF austerity programs also made the fertilizer subsidies possible.

Zambia continues its fertilizer subsidy program and is encouraging a Russian firm to build a new fertilizer plant to help them do it.

Saudi Arabia in Ethiopia ($2.5 billion for rice) and Zambia ($125 million for pineapple): “Saudi Star plans to export 2/3 of the food it will grow on the Ethiopian land…” The Saudi government announced this year that there are 27 other countries in whose agriculture it hopes to invest.

Hungry families turning down a free lunch. “When India was poor, its failure to feed itself properly did not seem odd. Poverty was explanation enough. But after one of the most impressive growth spurts in history, the country’s inability to lift the curse of malnutrition has emerged as its greatest failure—and biggest puzzle. … Astonishingly, a third of the wealthiest 20% of Indian children are malnourished, too, and they are neither poor nor excluded.” After complaining that Indian plans to reduce hunger are insufficient given the structural and bureaucratic difficulties, however, the Economist’s answer of turning the program into a CCT that wouldn’t address them either seems odd.

Why? Try Banerjee and Duflo's explanation: "The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim. We shouldn’t forget, too, that other things may be more important in their lives than food."

Easterly asks, Why are we not concerned about the brain drain in North Dakota? I don’t know where he was during the previous gubernatorial election, but in the great state he and I share the brain drain out of New York State was a major debating topic. While it’s true no one proposed putting a wall around the state to keep people in, it was still a topic of concern.

Big Bag of African Agriculture

Fair trade coffee in Uganda, which liberalized coffee export in the 1990s: Prices remained low initially, leading to reduced supply and quality. Organizers of a free trade initiative with 7500-15000 farmers claim that they have known how to produce high quality coffee but haven’t had incentives. The price premium is roughly 25% plus investment in community public goods.

Also in Uganda: mud quarries. “what we get is a fascinating portrait of a village doing the best it can with an informal land system, yet obviously still in need of some sort of formality.” The mud is a valuable building material locally.

South Africa plans that agroprocessers will add 500k jobs over the next ten years and are providing capitalization funds. The funds are coming from the court payments required of Pioneer Foods for collusion and price-fixing. The government also hopes to increase the number of smallholder farmers from 200k to 250k by providing training and extension services. Employment in agriculture and agroprocessing has been declining.

Zambia’s president is not predicting turmoil from the north spilling in, crediting good multiparty elections for his confidence.

Learning African English via Wikipedia

FAO estimates that if rural women had equal access to land, technology, financial services, education, and markets , agricultural production could increase enough to feed an additional 100-150 million people, 12-17 percent of the world’s total. Diouf has called for equality as a means to “win, sustainably, the fight against hunger and extreme poverty.” Again, the question is if we pursue equality as a right, or because it is morally right, or because it pays us to do so.

On the infrastructure constraints in African agriculture:

Statistics indicate that only 34% of sub-Saharan Africa’s rural population lives within two kilometers of a paved road. In most of Africa, poor road infrastructure accounts for investors deciding to look elsewhere. “Every fifth African needs at least five hours to get to the nearest market….” Beavogui says.

Reasons to be optimistic about Africa, video below the fold. Among the interesting points he makes is that vehicle operating costs in Africa are no higher than in price, but the prices to put goods on ships are the highest in the world. Only 1% of the money allocating for non-wage health support actually gets where it was intended. Yes, this is why he is optimistic. It means that there are obvious problems that can be readily solved. As a result, implementing some simple remedies reduced Rwandan child mortality by 33%.

Lit in Review: HIV/AIDS

De Walque reports in third person on his own research:

The pervasive if unstated belief in the HIV/AIDS community is that males are primarily responsible for spreading the infection among married and cohabiting couples.... most couples affected by HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa live in ... relationships in which only one of the two partners is HIV-positive while the other one is HIV-negative.

Contrary to assumption, however, it is not the case that the HIV-positive partner is most often the male. In fact, a new study found that women were just as likely to be the HIV-positive partner. An earlier study had placed the figure closer to 30-40%. When the same is restricted to women who have been in one relationship for 10 years (reducing the chance of her bringing HIV with her into the union), the proportion is still roughly 1 in 3. Though I don't agree when de Walque calls this "just as likely" I would agree that it calls the basic assumption into question and supports better research into the channels by which AIDS spreads. Ignoring one apparently significant channel by assuming it does not exist not only prevents progress, it serves to further the victimization of women.

Topping this off is another paper (Leclerc et al, 2009) that tried to fit Zambian HIV infection data with epidemiological models and demonstrated just how difficult a task it is to model: "Our reference simulation (H0) was obtained after more than one hundred simulation trials, all the others leading to inconsistent patterns." They find that "the lifetime risk of infection is quite similar for both sexes, and women tend to be infected earlier." "Among the main constraints found in the simulation was the age at peak infection for males. It was almost impossible to reach values greater than 35 or 36 years for men while keeping the main parameters within a range of realistic values."

Another paper, also by de Walque and colleagues, shows that HIV households in Mozambique were not affected more than non-HIV households by the 2007/08 food crisis, perhaps thanks to increased health interventions that increased their labor force participation.

Meanwhile, there is actually good news from Zimbabwe: HIV infection rates halved between 1997 and 2007.
The study cites increased awareness of AIDS-related deaths as the primary cause of the drop. The Leclarc study also reports a drop (or at least a slowing) in infection rates in Zambia since 2001.

Food Prices are Now at 2008 Peak

The big news is that FAO's measure of  general food prices in December reached the peak we had in 2008, a little more than twice as high as prices were in 2002-2004. Evans and GDN are quick to point out the difference between this time and last:

• Most of the increase is in meat, sugar, and vegetable oils rather than cereals. Poor consumers can substitute away from those products and buy more staples, so they should be hit less hard than last time.
• Of staple cereals (left) rice has seen very little movement - still at half of its old peak - and wheat is still well below its peak. This is important because the most harmful and wide-reaching policy actions last time happened in countries where rice is the most important staple. If rice prices stay where they were in 2009, we might avoid a repeat of 2008's policy reactions.
• Only maize, the cheapest of the three, has reached its 2008 peak. This is another contributing factor in why meat prices are high.
• Many African countries have done a good job responding to the last food crisis by investing more in their agriculture. As a result, African and Asian countries have had bumper crops - so much so that while world maize increased 45%, they are down 10% in some parts of Africa.
• Oil prices are still $50/barrel lower than their peak in 2008, another boon to farmers.

GDN argues that among the implications of these is that US policy can have a large impact by suspending biofuel mandates and improving food aid policies when the farm bill comes up for debate again in 2012.

One thing neither report mentions is possible psychology factors. The 2008 food crisis had a very high percentage change in food prices, while absolute price changes were relatively small and remained lower than they were in the mid 1980s for the most part. This time we are at a higher base, so there is a smaller percentage increase in prices. If it is less the absolute price level that matters to consumers' perceptions and chance of rioting, and more the rapid change in percentage that matters, that would help explain why we see so little unrest right now as well.


Nelson at IFPRI points out that the relative threats to the global food system change over time. Right now, population and income growth matter most, making random weather shocks more potent than they would have been ten years ago. Over the next 40 years, however, population growth is expected to slow so it will be less important and climate change and supply side factors will become more important. He predicts that the next 40 years will see a doubling of maize prices and roughly a 50 percent increase in rice and wheat prices. If agricultural research can increase productivity 40 percent beyond the baseline scenario, however, those increases can be cut in half.

IFPRI has just released a new set of international wheat market tools to help people track prices and other information. Further tools are expected soon for maize and rice. Worldwatch Institute is also releasing its new report on 15 innovations that are already happening in parts of Africa to increase production on small farms and reduce hunger. I will return to that report in a future post.

Zamiba's Food Reserve Agency is exporting nearly 300 thousand tonnes of maize to nearby Namibia, DRC, and Zimbabwe. High export costs and a lack of trucks have been slowing the process.

Update: "so little unrest" is a bit more than I thought:

And just as they were posting, riots flared up in Algeria, with two killed and hundreds injured in the protests against soaring food prices. Across the border in Tunisia 14 were killed in clashes with the police. As the unrest spreads across northern Africa, Egypt is nervously trying to put measures in place to prevent any comparable violence, with extra supplies of meat being flown in from Kenya. An occupational hazard of blogging; no sooner have you posted, than somewhere in the world you have been outstripped by events.

Two Successes in African Agriculture

In a news report that could be a reprinted press release, Zambeef - a Zambian meatpacker - reports that they have grown from "an abattoir and two butcher shops" into a $200 million-a-year company. After a beginning that speaks of the great promise of Zambian agriculture to become African's next breadbasket, the rest of the article details the many infrastructural, financial, and societal limitations preventing agriculture from reaching its potential... in most cases.

FAO is also celebrating that rinderpest - a deadly cattle disease - is on the brink of extermination worldwide. This would be the second disease in the world we've eradicated (the first being smallpox). The disease came to Africa in the mid-1800s from Europe and Asia and has been known to single handedly cause famines and kill millions of people because of the loss of livestock. "When the disease arrived in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century between 80% and 90% of cattle and buffalo on the continent were killed." FAO is expecting the announcement of total eradication May 2011. The last outbreak was in Kenya, 2001. It was accomplished in large part by training locals to recognize the disease and getting them a vaccine developed in the 1960s. Reports emphasize the need for international cooperation to eradicate the disease: one country would make an effort to combat it, but it would spread to another country and come back again later.

In other news (where news = another reprinted press releases), Planters (you know, one of those eeeevil US MNCs) is training African cashew farmers about sustainable farming practices.

All you need is ... political will

The simple story: the newly elected Malawian president said "Hey, I didn’t get elected to be a beggar nation, and right now we’re begging for about 45 percent of our food. Do you have any suggestions?" They enacted fertilizer and seed subsidies

Within two years, Malawi went from famine to food exportation. Now the fertilizer subsidies have caught on among neighboring countries—10 are testing similar policies, including Tanzania, Nigeria and Zambia. Faced with the evidence of success, USAID, the World Bank, and many European donors are putting their support behind subsidy programs.

“The dogma was that you don’t subsidize African farmers, even though we subsidize American, European and Japanese farmers to the tune of 1 billion U.S. dollars a day,” Professor Sánchez says. “Things have changed. It was basically the political will from one president.”

One man saved the day. A similar story is being told in Zambia. But now let's talk about the seeds:

A major criticism of the Malawi model is that it encourages farmers to turn to a single staple crop (and yes, it's corn, in case you were wondering...). Horticulturist Linda Larish notes that the traditional Malawian staple, a taro-like plant called manioc, has largely been abandoned by farmers switching to imported hybrid corn.

“Even though they are self-sufficient and can grow their own food, they are at the mercy of the seed and fertilizer companies,” Larish says.

Not by coincidence, Malawi’s policies gave Monsanto a foothold for its hybrid maize in sub-Saharan Africa. Is it philanthropy, PR, or simply shrewd business?

Meanwhile, other scientists are finding ways to improve native rice varieties themselves, rather than merely splicing genes from African varieties into the more popular, commercialized Asian varieties.